Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: OpenAI to acquire startup Astral, expanding push into coding…Fourteen Catholic theologians have filed briefs in federal court supporting Anthropic…Rogue AI agent inside Meta triggers security alert…Why AI has not yet upset India’s IT industry.
I just got back from a couple of whirlwind days at SXSW in Austin, Texas, an annual collision of music, food, tech, and cultural hype. It’s the kind of event where live music spills out of every building, the tacos and BBQ never seem to end, and somewhere in between, people are busy debating the future of AI.
I was there to moderate a panel presented by U.K. biotech company Basecamp Research—one I suspected would be especially interesting given that the startup began with a 2019 expedition to the Arctic to discover new species and genes. Cofounders Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince found that two-thirds of the samples they hauled back to a makeshift lab in Iceland had never been recorded before. That experience led them to take a bet on building what they describe as an “internet of biology” for AI models to train on. It was a moonshot—an effort to capture 4.4 billion years of evolution and map the entire tree of life, a goal as ambitious as it sounds.
